Stephan: Quite apart from issues of alcoholism, whose results we all know, it turns out there is much more damage than that resulting from drinking alcohol. The consumption of alcohol, particularly regularly and in quantity, Oxford University researchers have now reported, literally alters your telomeres and changes your genetics prematurely aging you in the process.
The full paper discussed in this report can be read at: Alcohol consumption and telomere length: Mendelian randomization clarifies alcohol’s effects. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01690-9
The short-term effects of excessive drinking are well known, but to date it has been less certain whether alcohol also accelerates the aging process.
Traditionally, investigating this has been challenging due to the lack of reliable methods to measure biological aging. In addition, it was not clear from observational studies whether alcohol was the true cause of any effect, or if it was linked to other factors, such as socio-economic status.
Today, researchers from Oxford Population Health have published results from a new genetic-based analysis which suggest that alcohol directly accelerates aging by damaging DNA in telomeres. The findings are published today in Molecular Psychiatry.
Telomeres are repetitive DNA sequences that cap the end of chromosomes, protecting them from damage. Telomere length is considered an indicator of biological aging, since 50-100 DNA bases are lost each time a cell replicates. Once telomeres become too short, cells can no longer divide and may even die. Previous studies have linked shorter telomere lengths with several aging-related diseases including Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and coronary artery disease.
In this analysis, the researchers investigated the association […]
Stephan: I have been warning my readers for a decade that this was coming, and now we are beginning to get hard data that it has arrived. Viruses and bacteria are mutating to accommodate for the human-mediated changes in the climate. This is also why I predict that Covid is far from the last pandemic we will experience. I expect to see similar pandemics occurring every few years from now on, and for a number of decades. This is part of the price we as humans are going to have to pay for our stupidity and the unregulated greed of corporate interests.
Credit: Getty
More than half of the infectious diseases known to impact humans are being aggravated by climate change, scientists reported Monday in a new study in the journal Nature Climate Change. The research found that illnesses like hepatitis, cholera, malaria, and hundreds of others were spreading faster, expanding in range, and becoming more severe because of climate-related events.
It’s not just transmission that’s increasing; climate change is also making it harder to fight off these diseases by reducing people’s health, immunity, and access to medical care, the researchers concluded.
“Global health response to the diversity of these diseases will need to be massive,” said Erik Franklin, an associate research professor at the University of Hawai’i and one of the authors of the study. “It’s another piece of evidence that we’re in trouble. It’s a call to arms to rapidly decrease our greenhouse gas emissions load.”
The research, led by scientists at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, focused on 10 kinds of extreme weather events exacerbated by greenhouse gases, including floods, heat waves, drought, and wildfires. The […]
Stephan: Let me start by reminding you that not a single Republican voted for the massive climate remediation effort funded by the just passed in the Senate Inflation Recovery Act. How is it possible, I think it is reasonable to ask, that the Republican Party has made itself willfully ignorant about climate change? Or do they know and just don't care about the future climate change is going to inflict on their constituents? The answer I think, and Elizabeth Kolbert seems to agree is that the Republicans and both Manchin and Sinema on the Democrat side, are basically nothing but whores paid for by the corporate polluters who produced our pollution problems in the first place.
It is my belief that historians in the future are going to condemn the Republicans for the unethical cretins they have proven themselves to be. But they are also going to condemn the Americans who voted these men and women into office. Whose side are you on?
In January, 2000, during the run-up to the New Hampshire primaries, Presidential candidates in the Granite State were confronted by a young man—a recent Dartmouth graduate—wearing a red cape, orange long johns, and yellow-painted galoshes. He called himself Captain Climate, and asked any candidate within shouting distance, “What’s your plan?” All the candidates ignored him, except one.
That candidate was John McCain, then the senior United States senator from Arizona. McCain went on to win New Hampshire’s Republican primary and then to lose the nomination to George W. Bush. He had been troubled enough by the shouted question that he returned to Washington that spring and held a series of hearings on climate change. At the first hearing, he apologized for not having a plan to deal with the problem, but said that everyone—especially policymakers—should be “concerned about mounting evidence.” “I had a genuine sense that he wanted to know the best information,” Kevin Trenberth, a scientist from the National Center for Atmospheric Research who testified at one of the hearings, later recalled.
Stephan: Oliver Milman has written an excellent historical review of how we got to where we are with petroleum pollution. I think it is important to understand this trend because facts make it very clear why the current practices must end.
The US has been battling for climate crisis legislation for nearly six decades. Credit: Bryan Olin Dozier / NurPhoto /REX / Shutterstock
The scientists’ warning to the US president on climate crisis was stark: the world’s countries were conducting a vast, dangerous experiment through their enormous release of planet-heating emissions, which threaten to be “deleterious from the point of view of human beings”. Some sort of remedial action was needed, they urged.
This official alert was issued not to Joe Biden, who is poised to sign America’s first ever major legislation designed to tackle the climate crisis, but in a report given to his presidential predecessor Lyndon Johnson in 1965, a year when the now 79-year-old Biden was still in college.
That it has taken nearly six decades for the US to tackle global heating in a significant way, despite being responsible for a quarter of all emissions that have heated the planet during modern civilization, is indicative of a lengthy climate war. Pernicious misinformation of the fossil fuel industry, cynicism and bungled political maneuvering have stymied any sort of action […]
Stephan: In the Red states that passed anti-choice legislation healthcare is being severely impacted post-Roe. Impacted in a very negative way which will affect the lives of millions of women. Fewer OB'GYNs are going to set up practice in those Red states, and that is going to become a long-term trend. Fewer doctors to help women maintain good health, will mean poorer health care in states already low on the rankings.
Rep. Susie Lee, D-Nev., said the Dobbs decision will lead to fewer people going into OB-GYN “because they’re not going to be able to practice health care that keeps their patients safe.” Credit: Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call
Ghazaleh Moayedi credits many of her strengths as a Texas-based obstetrician-gynecologist to training related to abortion. Outpatient abortion training builds bedside manner and teaches practical technical skills outside of a hospital, she says.
“Having so much experience in abortion care has actually really trained me and prepared me in handling other situations,” said Moayedi, a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health and a mentor to many residents.
She pointed to her adeptness with early ultrasonography, used to identify complications in early pregnancy.
But since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, broad bans on most abortions in Texas and other states could hamper training for future medical providers.
“I had a medical student that messaged me and said they were on their obstetrics rotation and were saying, like, […]
